Bonkers

How to spell bonkers

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bonkers

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bonkers mean?

1. adjectiveMad, irrational, or wildly unreasonable, used informally.

Bonkers in a sentence

• The new parking rules at work are absolutely bonkers.

• Spending that much on a single meal sounds completely bonkers to me.

Where does bonkers come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bonkers is a piece of twentieth-century British slang whose origin is genuinely murky, so confidence in any single story should stay low. It is first recorded in the 1940s, where in naval and everyday British use it meant 'light-headed' or 'slightly drunk' rather than fully insane. Most lexicographers connect it to 'bonk', an imitative word for a sharp knock or thump, as though someone had taken a knock on the head; the strengthening suffix '-ers' (also seen in playful coinages like 'starkers' and 'crackers') turned it into the adjective we know. Over the following decades the sense hardened from merely dizzy to thoroughly mad or wildly irrational, and it spread from Britain into American and Canadian informal speech. Because the word is built from a punchy single syllable plus a casual ending, the spelling is largely phonetic, and the only thing a writer has to remember is the plain 'o' and the closing '-ers'.

How the word is built

• bonk (imitative word for a knock on the head)
• -ers (informal English suffix)